Access your Pro+ Content below.

Survey: Fibre Channel rules planned purchases

A majority of respondents (65%) to Storage magazine's 2008 priorities survey have earmarked part of their 2008 budget to buy Fibre Channel (FC) storage. Multiprotocol arrays and NAS arrays tied for a distant second, with 34% of those surveyed planning to buy those systems. Respondents are planning to buy iSCSI arrays and DAS arrays in nearly equal numbers, 28% and 26%, respectively. Just 6% of respondents plan to buy JBOD systems. Click Here for a PDF of this Survey.

Features
in this issue

Organizations of all sizes have adopted iSCSI because it's easy to install, inexpensive, behaves just like Ethernet and doesn't require specialized skill sets like Fibre Channel does. But do analyst claims that iSCSI performance falls short of that for Fiber Channel hold up?

Today's application continuity computing (ACC) products are best suited for small- and medium-sized businesses, and are focused exclusively on Exchange, which most companies now consider a business-critical application. But the concentration on Exchange will likely change over the next few years, as several ACC vendors plan support for SQL Server and SharePoint in the future.

Clustered storage combines multiple arrays or controllers to increase their performance, capacity or reliability. But the technology isn't right for every company. We outline what you need to know before deciding to adopt clustered storage.

No "big name" vendor has yet won the top spot in our Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Awards for midrange arrays. This year, two relative newcomers--Compellent and EqualLogic--topped the field of competitors.

Thin provisioning is a promising way to address allocation and performance. One of the biggest challenges when using the technology is knowing where your data lives, and whether it can be tracked or recovered if there's a catastrophic component failure.